Cape Town Conference: Japanese give Google a run for their money

The Japanese agency has created an online news hub called 47News that joins 52 newspapers across their country’s 47 prefectures.

Yamaguchi said that “the slow growth of revenue from websites run by individual local newspapers prompted the papers to combine their forces, because they want to revitalize their own newspaper websites.” He said the structural fall in advertising revenues was jeopardizing the management base of newspapers worldwide.

Faced with this harsh business climate, the 52 newspapers made up their mind to make a full-fledged challenge at creating an Internet-based news business, hoping to develop it into their third revenue source after the circulation of printed newspapers and the sale of ad space.

The Hub allows the users to come and go freely between the websites of individual member newspapers and get online information provided by newspapers deeply rooted in their own communities. Contents are linked among member newspapers websites to create a huge online news network.

“In United States, the keyword for online newspaper is local! Local! And hyper-local contents are important. This is also true in Japan, and many local newspapers are taking efforts to make online websites for the benefit of local audience.”

The business environment of Japan is booming, and internet and broadband usage is increasing rapidly. Almost half of Japanese households already have broadband and the government is aiming for 100% by 2010.

The News Hub is aiming to reach and use these large numbers of users and give competition to new IT businesses such as Yahoo! and Google, which have eaten into traditional media circulations and revenue.

Fifteen of the papers on the hub have a podcasting service, and five run vodcasting (video pod casting).

According to the Dentsu Communication Institute, Japan's Internet advertising revenue in 2006 was 363-billion yen and it is projected to double in the next five years, reaching 750-billion (US$6.236 billion) in 2011.

 “Within 5 years Internet online advertising will surpass the level of the newspaper advertising” said Yamaguchi, and this is the market that 47News is planning to exploit.

“Just more than five months since the startup, we have given our portal design a major facelift to make it more attractive and user-friendly. The best news story of the day will be uploaded manually by member newspaper editors” said Ko.

In the 47NEWS service, editors have to play a new role. They have to facilitate the online news flow from local to national beyond the boundaries of their newspapers as news is disseminated across the boundaries of prefectures and cities.

Judy Lelliott, Wits University Journalism